How to Open a Link in a Small Window or Pop-up

by Joelle Steele

An external or outgoing link can take a visitor from a page in one website to a page in a different website. These offsite links take your visitor away from your website, so you better have a pretty compelling reason to drive that valuable traffic away.

There are two ways that you can deal with this potential problem. First and best solution, if you want your visitor to have access to an informational article on another website, consider writing such an article yourself and placing it on your own website instead. Second, if you must use an outgoing link, create one that opens in a smaller pop-up window so that your web page still remains clearly visible underneath it.

Here’s some sample HTML code that makes that happen:

< a href=”http://www.otherweb.com/” target=” blank”>visit Other Web </a>

The boldfaced part of the above code is what creates the pop-up window.

There are a few caveats when it comes to using pop-up windows. Not everyone realizes that it’s a new window opening and your back button will be automatically reset on the pop-up window, so your visitor can’t back out of it but must instead “x” out of it. This can be confusing, especially to the visually impaired, and especially when the taskbar becomes overly cluttered with all these additional open windows.

This article last updated: 08/23/2015.